Thirteen years ago today I purchased this domain. According to Wayback Machine I referred to March 15th as my official “Hello World.”

Which was about a week and a half after WordPress 1.5 was officially released. It wasn’t a coincidence. I’d been toying with starting a blog for a couple of months, looking at all of the “free” options and being unsatisfied. Digging deeper, I found WordPress. This was still 1.2 with no real theme or plugin system – my-hacks.php y’all. Anyway, I started playing with the beta and figuring out how to get it installed on a shared server with “pretty permalinks”. Soon after the stable release I settled on a url and jumped in.

About the name—I get this question often. Back in the days of arcade and console games when you got a high score or save position, often the user name was 3 characters. My initials never clicked for me so I used MIK. In high school, I was Michael B. Somewhere between the 2 I came up with the user name miklb and it was a short domain and truthfully, I didn’t know what I was doing. Also, all variations of Michael & Bishop were taken, dominated by a star college quarterback in Kansas.

Armed with Smultron, Cyberduck and a desire to make my own website and blog, here I am, writing this post in Atom Editor(very much the Smultron of today), which will make it’s way to a blog post on a site running a very much different version of WordPress than where it started.

Thank you to every single one of you who’ve provided help, insight and friendship along this journey.